[February 28, 2017]

Fortumo Launches Bundling Platform for Digital Content Merchants

The mobile payments company Fortumo is today launching its Bundling Platform for merchants and mobile operators. The new platform helps digital merchants accelerate their user acquisition activities in partnership with carriers by allowing new bundle deals to be rolled out more quickly than ever before.

The Bundling Platform connects merchants to the entire network of Fortumo's mobile operator partners and facilitates the exchange of information on which mobile subscribers should receive access to which bundle offers. The platform is fully flexible in supporting all types of bundle deals (hard or soft bundles; free or discounted access to service; free data promotions) and removes the need for merchants to integrate each mobile operator API separately for every bundle deal.

"User acquisition - especially in emerging markets - is one of the most burning questions for digital content merchants today. Carriers are a great partner with whom to solve this challenge as their marketing reach is unmatched. However, making individual bundle deals with dozens of carriers is time-consuming and inefficient. Fortumo's Bundling Platform helps merchants manage their user lifecycle in a scalable manner, so they can fcus on converting acquired users into paying customers," said Martin Koppel, CEO and co-founder of Fortumo.

The Bundling Platform is complemented by Fortumo's Messaging API and Payments API, creating an end-to-end platform for the user journey. This means one integration with Fortumo can be used for managing users signing up via carrier channels, up-selling activities and eventually converting them to paying customers.

"Bundle deals alone are not enough to build a paying user base in markets where prepaid SIM cards are predominant. Most users simply opt out of the service after the bundle deal is over, leaving merchants and carriers with empty hands. By helping the customer in each step to becoming a paying user, we can substantially grow the benefits from bundle deals for everyone," added Martin Koppel.

Fortumo's Bundling Platform has been built on a robust and flexible infrastructure, supporting bundle deals for merchants in segments as varied as streaming (Spotify (News - Alert) or Netflix), cloud hosting (DropBox or SkyDrive), digital publishing (Magzter), anti-viruses (Avast, Norton) and productivity tools (Evernote, Office 365). As mobile operators can launch multiple bundle deals to highly customized user segments in parallel, more relevant consumers end up using each digital service and are less likely to churn out.

Fortumo sees that with bundling, much like with direct carrier billing in the past few years, the business will transition into a merchant-aggregator-carrier partnership model. This is because for merchants and carriers, using a middle layer allows to save time on technical development and commercial negotiations while allowing for a quicker roll-out of partnerships.

The company is rolling out its Bundling Platform first in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe, where the first bundles between mobile operators and digital merchants done through its platform will go live in Q2 2017.

About Fortumo

Fortumo is a mobile payments company that enables direct carrier billing with more than 350 mobile operators in 90+ countries. Fortumo's payment products work across a wide range of platforms including desktop devices, smartphones, feature phones, tablets and smart TV-s. These products give consumers a simple, 1-click payment method to charge online purchases to their phone bill. For app stores, digital media companies and game developers, Fortumo provides one integration with 350 mobile operators as well as a single point of contact for settlements, reporting, support and infrastructure upgrades. Founded in 2007, Fortumo has offices in Estonia, San Francisco, Beijing, Delhi, Singapore & Hanoi and is backed by Intel (News - Alert) Capital and Greycroft Partners. For more information, please visit https://fortumo.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170228005803/en/

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